Dr. J

by Julius Erving

  Our basketball brain trust includes Rod Thorn, a West Virginia guy who played with Jerry West and Rod Hundley and who has an encyclopedic knowledge of the game. And we’ve got the wise, hard-nosed veteran point guard Bill Melchionni, who is almost as old as Kevin and acts as a sort of coach on the floor.

  From the start of camp, it’s clear that I’m the spiritual and psychological leader of this team. The guys are taking their cues from me, and Kevin even tells me at one point that the reason the rest of the guys are working as hard as they are is because they see me doing it. We have a couple of guys I’ve played with up at Rucker—Billy Paultz, the big six-foot-eleven center from St. John’s, and small forward Billy Schaeffer, another Johnnie. In addition to Melchionni, we have Brian Taylor, a skilled, quick guard out of Princeton. Our best shooter is John Roche, a second-year man from South Carolina. And we have two very promising rookies in power forward Larry Kenon from Memphis State and shooting guard John Williamson, a scoring machine from New Mexico State. And we have Willie Sojourner, who drives up from Virginia in his tiny Datsun Roadster.

  I’m gratified when the guys vote me the co-captain, a responsibility I feel I’m ready to shoulder.

  It’s hard for me to compare the talent level to our Virginia squads—there’s no individual stud quite like Charlie Scott or George Gervin, though Larry Kenon is close. We’re all impressed with him. For a big man, he’s got such grace and he’s a wicked finisher around the rim. I’m looking forward to having him on the other side of the lane on fast breaks. If there is any concern I have about this team, it’s that we may not be physically tough enough to get past the Kentuckys and Indianas of the ABA. On the other hand, in terms of team chemistry, there is a good, loose feeling about this bunch of guys that I’ve never felt before. It comes from the top, where Kevin and Rod both come out to practice in sweats and sneakers and actually scrimmage with the team, which is a great way of getting to know their players and how to make the most use of our particular abilities. One thing Kevin picks up from playing with me, and against me, is that he can use me as a defensive stopper, which he hadn’t anticipated based on my reputation as a scorer coming out of Virginia.

  But while Paultz is a talented center and gifted scorer, he’s not known as a banger. He’s not an intimidator, and in this league we need someone who can keep the Artis Gilmores and Mel Danielses from taking my legs out from under me when I’m driving. There are a couple of guys around the league, like Joe Caldwell from Carolina, who have the athleticism to give me a tough matchup. And then there are some enforcers who figure the easiest way to shut me down is to injure me. Wendell Ladner from Kentucky is a player like that, a guy whose plan to stop me seems to be to either break my legs or somehow bait me into a pair of technicals. I once tossed a stool onto the court in Virginia after I had my legs taken out from under me on a shot and no foul was called. The ref saw the stool flying past him and called a technical. I was lying on the floor, looking over at him, and shouting, “You think I just decided to lay down here? I was fouled.” I know I need to be careful not to get into too many situations like this or I’ll end up costing my team. But as I’m looking around the Nets lineup, I realize that we don’t have a guy who I can count on to slug Wendell back if he takes a shot at me.

  Maybe the only guy on our team who will go out there and throw a punch is Kevin Loughery, and he’s our coach.

  Otherwise, this upcoming season in the shiny new Nassau Coliseum is as promising as any in my basketball career. The only thing missing, I realize, is Turquoise. She flies up to see me over the summer, and we swim in the ocean in front of the condo. At night, we drive the Avanti into Manhattan and take a table at a restaurant or sometimes a coffee shop and people watch. For both of us, there is something so exciting about being in New York—and I don’t know this yet, but these are the last few months when I can still move around without being mobbed by autograph seekers.

  On one of those visits, Turquoise tells me she’s pregnant.

  I’m standing behind the counter in the condo. I’m holding a Coca-Cola, and for a second I flash on Ray Wilson standing outside the car, in high school, pounding the windows, telling me that kissing makes babies.

  “How did this happen?” I’m asking Turq. “Weren’t you using protection?”

  She shrugs. “I was. It happens.”

  “And it’s mine?” I ask.

  She nods.

  “How do you know?”

  “I know, okay?”

  It crosses my mind that this could be intentional. But it also doesn’t matter because I love this woman.

  I feel like if she’s carrying my child, then I should ask her and her son to move up here with me.

  I’m going to need a bigger condo.

  3.

  Once Turquoise and Cheo move up to New York, I buy the two-bedroom condo next door. I realize I have a ready-made family with one baby already here and another in the oven. I’ve gone from being a swinging single to being very much a family man. And I’m very impressed with how Turquoise deals with the situation. She is a powerful, calculating, confident woman, who has the tools to handle whatever life is going to throw at us. Put it this way: since I’ve gone pro, there are plenty of women who have decided to see if they could get with me because I’m the star player on a basketball team—and I don’t say that with any intended arrogance but merely as a statement of fact about professional sports—and Turquoise is the first who has succeeded in entering my life and staying here. She loves me and is intelligent enough to realize that I’m on my way to something greater. Who could blame her for wanting a taste of that?

  There is a fierce physical chemistry between us. We have a great sexual bond, but we also just like being around each other. Our personalities somehow mesh. I’m more academically inclined, perhaps more book smart, and Turq is definitely more street-smart. I’m more reserved, perhaps a little too reserved according to Turq, and she is outspoken. If she wants something, you’ll hear about it. That harmonic balance, a yin and yang, doesn’t necessarily make for a blissful domestic partnership—we do have our fights—but it does make for a durable one.

  My mom isn’t too happy about our shacking up, and it’s no use telling her that we’re living in a different era and there’s nothing scandalous about men and women living together out of wedlock. Part of what bothers Mom, I know, is that she and Carol were very close—and both very religious—and she is having a hard time accepting Turquoise into her life. When I tell Mom that Turq is expecting, she realizes that Turq is a fixture in my life, but she’ll never bond with her in the ways that I might have hoped. One thing Mom can tell is that Turquoise is a stand-by-your-man type of woman. And I can’t tell my mom this, but to be the partner of a ballplayer, you have to be tough. I don’t think Carol could have handled being with me.

  In October, during the exhibition season, Turquoise is in the kitchen and I’m standing on the other side of the galley. She has her hair tied up in a scarf, these delicate gold hoop earrings swinging against her honey-colored skin, aglow in the late afternoon light. Her brown hair descends from beneath her scarf in delicate wisps that wrap under her ears. She has generous lips with exquisite definition, so that it looks as if she is wearing lipstick even when she isn’t. And sometimes when she’s smiling, as she is now, her upper front teeth are visible between those beautiful lips. She’s telling me how happy she is, about where we are, about having come up to New York, and I decide that I will never find another woman like this, who combines the physical beauty, the toughness, the grace, and the intelligence of all the women I’ve ever admired.

  Yet the chaos of our lives has been gnawing at me—the disorder of a child out of wedlock, of living with another man’s son, of cohabitating with a woman in what my mom would consider sin. I need to get my life organized, to put everything back in its proper place. The season is starting soon and I don’t want to go into it having this sort of disarray waiting for me at home.

  And I believe in
marriage, and I want my child, and her child, to have what I never had: to grow up with a mother and a father.

  I ask Turquoise if she will marry me.

  Turq starts crying. “Yes! Yes!”

  I nod. This makes sense. I’ll adopt Cheo, raise him as my son. We’ll be a family, a real family.

  “Let’s do it before my birthday,” I say, “February tenth.”

  4.

  My routine is I wake around midmorning. Turq prepares my breakfast and I play a little bit with Cheo if he is awake. I stroll out of the condo and into my Avanti and head over to our practice facility in Queens.

  I’m getting a feel for my teammates, and they for me. In our first exhibition game, I score 42 against the Baltimore Bullets of the NBA and then play my first pro game in Madison Square Garden, a 98–87 victory over the defending NBA champion Knicks in which I go for 27 against my old friend Clyde Frazier before a sellout crowd of over seventeen thousand. I think that game serves notice to New York basketball fans that there are two championship contenders in town.

  My first official game in the red, white, and blue Nets uniform is in Indianapolis at the Fairgrounds Coliseum. I put up 42 points with 18 rebounds in a losing effort to the Pacers. We win our next 4 games, including a game down in Virginia at Scope, and I begin to develop increased respect for Kevin Loughery. He’s the most intuitive coach I’ve ever played for. He goes so much by feel, not only by who’s shooting the ball well, but also who is getting a step on his man, who is posing matchup problems for the other team, and who is having trouble with his own defensive assignment. He makes some of the fastest in-game adjustments I’ve ever seen. He’ll throw out the game plan in the first five minutes if he sees something that’s not working or an unforeseen opportunity. We come into games with a certain idea about how they will progress—say, for instance, that we want to pass the ball down low to Billy Paultz to get his guy in foul trouble. Some coaches will stick with that even after it’s clear that Billy doesn’t have as much of an edge on his guy as we thought he would. But Kevin will make a quick switch and in crucial situations, when other coaches are drawing up plays and scribbling on their chalkboard, he’ll sometimes just look at me and say, “Julius, make something happen.”

  What player wouldn’t like that? We’re such an athletic team that when Kevin lets us just play ball, we can turn the game into a track meet, which is fun for the fans but isn’t always the way to win a game. In Brian Taylor and Larry Kenon and John Williamson and me, we have some players who can fly. Taylor may be the fastest guy I’ve ever played with. I love fast-break basketball, we all do, and we know we can score this way. But Kevin—and Al Bianchi did this as well—reinforces the notion that there are good ways to score and not-so-good ways. If you are running down and dunking the ball on the break over and over, you’re just forcing yourself to play longer on defense. And you’re not managing the game. Remember my idea about imposing your will? In a basketball game, of course scoring is the ultimate goal, but you want to create situations, matchups, get guys into foul trouble or break down their defensive scheme so that they lose confidence in their own ability to stop you. Our opponents are fine with me scoring 42 in a losing effort. If I’m doing that, “making something happen” in the wrong way, then my center isn’t going to step up on defense and the guards might slack off. That’s not because they’re lazy; that’s just human nature. A team leader needs to keep his team involved and motivated. I need to take care of my guys. It’s a learning curve for me as well, especially after winning four of our first five and then losing nine in a row.

  In one of those games, a loss to Kentucky, I decide to take matters into my own hands and call for a clear-out on the left side of the lane, a play we call Arizona. Wendell Ladner has been fouling me all game, and I go into my crouch, jab step once, and Wendell bites on the fake and I spin around him, and Wendell just grabs my shirt and elbows me in the neck.

  “Come on, Wendell!”

  I’m getting ready to knock Wendell out and he’s looking at me all innocent, with his droopy mustache and baby-blue eyes. I realize Wendell wants me to take a shot at him, to punch him, so that we both get thrown out. I think back to Dan Ryan, at the Sal. I unleash a stream of profanities directed at Wendell while I’m stalking along the left baseline: “That is some fucking bullshit right there, Wendell. I’m fucking sick of that shit, man.”

  Then I run back down the court.

  I always leave two tickets for my mom. And she always sits down under that basket.

  After the game, we’re out to dinner at a steak house in Freeport and I ask her how she liked the game. She’s got a sour expression on her face, and she’s been quiet since we’ve sat down.

  “I didn’t like it.”

  I’m wondering what’s going on. Maybe it’s because we lost?

  “We’ll get ’em next time,” I say.

  “Julius, I don’t like it when you curse,” she says. “You were cursing at that boy, and I didn’t like that. I didn’t like that at all. I was very embarrassed.”

  I nod. “Okay, Mom. I’m sorry.”

  And then she asks when I’m going to get my degree.

  5.

  Kevin calls a team meeting in his suite after we lose our ninth straight in San Diego to the Wilt Chamberlain–coached Conquistadors. Closed-door meetings are a sign of crisis, and as a team, we are all aware that our game plan isn’t working. We go around the room, every player getting a chance to talk. Most of us offer the usual platitudes about where we’ve gone wrong. We’re not rebounding. We’re not committing on defense. We’re giving teams second shots. We like Kevin’s brand of fast-break basketball and pressing defense, but we all feel it is wearing us out more than our opponents. Kevin explains that he believes his system makes the best use of me and my abilities. And perhaps it does, but I’m getting worn down. Kevin thinks I can run all night, and maybe I can, but not every night for an eighty-four-game season. For the first time since the Olympic development tour and those Eastern European courts, I feel my knees aching. The team agrees with me. We can’t press for all four quarters and play fast-break offense all the time.

  Finally, we get to one of our rookies, John Williamson, and he stands up and says, “The problem is: I’m not starting. I’m not getting enough touches. I’m not shooting enough. If you want to win, you got to get the ball to Super John.”

  “Who is Super John?” asks Brian Taylor.

  “That’s what they call me,” says Williamson.

  “Who calls you that?” Taylor asks.

  “Everyone. Everyone calls me Super John.”

  We’re all laughing, I’m sitting there and I look over at Williamson. “Really? They call you Super John?”

  He nods.

  “Who exactly is calling you Super John?” Taylor asks.

  “Everyone. The fans. It’s . . . it’s in the papers.”

  “I’ve never heard that expression,” I say. “Have you?” I look at Billy.

  Paultz shakes his head. “Can’t say I have.”

  “Super John. Super John. It doesn’t ring a bell.”

  By now Williamson is getting upset. “Look, if you want to win, get the ball to Super John.”

  “Like Superman?” Taylor says.

  “That’s right.”

  “And that’s you?” I say. “Let me get this straight: Super John and you are the same person?”

  Williamson has a huge ego, but in some ways he does have a point. He is an emerging force, a slashing shooter who we have to better integrate into our offense. Melchionni is getting older, and he’s hurt, and Williamson should be getting more minutes at shooting guard. Super John is precocious in many ways. At home, in the kitchen, he’s an experimental chef whose invitations are shunned by his teammates after one meal. Chocolate-soaked chicken, anyone? He also claims to be a black belt in kung fu and that his sensei is such a fantastic leaper that he can practically fly. He corners me after practice one day and tells me, “Doc, these guys can fly
. They ain’t jumpin’, they are flying. Doc, you can already fly, so if you go with me to the dojo, you will be . . . double flying.”

  I need to see this for myself, so one afternoon I drive over with him to his dojo in Uniondale. I don’t see anyone flying or even jumping particularly high. What I do see is Super John getting knocked down an awful lot. I get knocked down enough on the basketball court—I’m not looking for any extra beatings. Kung fu isn’t for me.

  Larry Keenan is another young gun who needs more minutes. Keenan is so country, I’m not sure he ever adjusts to suburban life. He reminds me of my old freshman roommate at UMass, the vivisectionist. One afternoon I’m driving into the city with Super John and Keenan and Larry starts shouting, “Stop! Stop the car.”

  We’re in Queens. “Why?” I ask.

  “Man, look at them kids there. What are they doing?”

  I look over at a school yard. A bunch of kids are playing softball.

  “I never seen that,” he says.

  “Softball?” I say.

  He shakes his head. “That’s what they doing?”

  Back in Alabama, where Keenan is from, he’d never seen softball played on pavement. He finds that shocking, as if we would play basketball on ice.